Time-lapse video of flight captures aurora borealis

If given a whole row to themselves in a flight from San Francisco to Paris, most people would just sleep. Not this passenger, who set up his Canon 5D Mark II digital SLR camera on a tripod and attached a timelapse controller.

When he pointed his 16mm-to-35mm lens out his airplane window, the result was this remarkable timelapse video of his 11-hour flight.

Taking that Great Circle route above the polar regions, the video flies us through the aurora borealis, giving us a look at those spectacular northern lights.

Also remarkable is the fact that the Air France flight crew allowed the use of that bundle of electronic devices throughout the entire flight. At the end of this video, you'll see the rig with which he snapped the 2,459 shots -- one approximately every two miles. After the flight, they were edited together along with a few judiciously placed iPhone pics shot along the way.

By the way, you don't even need to be flying that far north to see the northern lights -- once on a night flight from Montréal to Detroit, I could see the aurora borealis out of the right side of the plane during the entire trip.